This post treats being an expert as an unambiguously good thing. Richard Hamming's essay Experts has a bit more of a nuanced take on the topic. He talks how paradigm shifts in fields often come from outsiders, while at the same time acknowledging how increasing complexity neccessitates specialisation. I suppose Hamming's essay focuses on scientific and social gain, whereas this post focuses on personal gain.
There were two execs on a plane. "My company makes hard drives. We polish metal plates and try to put a thin metal coating on them, but our tolerances are mediocre." "Oh? My company makes telescope mirrors. We polish glass optically flat and lay down coatings measured in nanometers." "Oh, man, we've got to talk some more." Boom, Seagate.
KiCad is by far the best. It is not as powerful as commercial tools: a lot of its high frequency design tools are simple calculators, and so a lot of manual work is required where you would simply set constraints in other packages. It has a neat design rule scripting language which you can use to ensure your requirements are met though. I’ve done a couple boards with frequencies up to the UHF band and don’t think I’d want to go any higher in KiCad. That being said, for simple boards it’s plenty powerful.
You can do anything in kicad; altium isn't doing anything special to make something possible that's not possible in kicad.
The problem is that it's exceedingly tedious to do in kicad some of the more advanced things that altium and others can do.
Think C vs C++. Nothing C++ does is inherently impossible in C (in terms of observable side effects). For example, RAII is a one liner in C++. In C, it's two lines and some extra thought about control flow. Not impossible, just a bit more mental overhead.
It also says “one writer even has Pythagoras himself "to his eternal shame" sentencing Hippasus to death by drowning, for showing "that
2√2 is an irrational number”.”
There are some promising codecs based on neural networks, however they are all very much research projects and have major limitations. Additionally, the compression ratios are only marginally higher than state-of-the-art engineered codecs. I think for your use case a more modern engineered codec such as VVC (H.266) or AV1 is perhaps more suitable.
